Low-effort method for quickly determining the most economical strategy of material provisioning for the dynamic design of transformable assembly systems

More and more products are subject to volatile markets with rapidly changing sales. In addition the number increases in product variations as well as part variations in the course of the product life cycle strongly. To produce economically in this environment it is necessary to apply transformable material provision strategies and set-up strategies in the assembly, which fit to the changing numbers and version number. For small-volume products with different multi container systems as well as different commissioning systems there is a wide range of material provisioning strategies available. Out of these different strategies companies have to define the best strategy according to market situation. With the current methods this process is very time-consuming. A new resource-poor procedure for rapid identification of the most economical strategy can be applied in daily operations at each change in the market situation. In this paper the principle of the new procedure is introduced based on the quick determination of internal transportation and set-up times by means of approximate calculation.